chamb

looks nice for sure. I will be waiting to see if the folding causes a problem. Will something break when you fold it many times a day. How durable is it going to be? If it does stand up to years of heavy use, then it just might be a big seller.

It has been acting badly for months. Probably started with Android 10. Very slow updates to signal levels. I do have the stale data workaround checked, but I am not sure it is helping anything.

Yes, when SCP is running in the background and I bring it up on the full screen, I have a receive level that is bad. Maybe something like -118. If I leave it alone for 15 seconds or more ,it will correct and show a correct level of maybe -100. I do not have to force stop the app. I need to get into the menus to see if the phone is sort of going to sleep when idle or if SCP is not doing a query quickly or what. If I keep SCP displayed on the screen the levels have been slow updating and generally not dependable for months since a software update on the phone. I tend to blame the Samsung s9 rather than SCP. I THINK the phone is not reporting the level as often as it did in the past. Probably to save the battery or something like that. Not good for us however.

If TM does actually acquire Shentel, they need to keep the Shentel network intact and add TM spectrum to the Shentel Sites. Shentel built the near perfect network. Shentel is way way better than TM ever will be in this area. Shentel has the backbone established and it was done correctly.

I found HPUE to be almost worthless. Before HPUE, I could lock onto band 41 in my home, but it would never work because I could not get a signal from my home to the cell site. Once I had HPUE capability, it still did not work but occasionally I did at least feel that my signal was received at the cell site, but it only happened a very few times. One problem was that band 41 carriers were aggregated and I suspect that HPUE would only work with one Band 41 carrier. It may have worked on paper, but not in my actual use. I am still using Sprint service, but I actually have band 41 disabled. I get a solid band 25 at good speed so I do not need band 41 and its issues. Using Galaxy s9.

Very Good point. Somebody tell management to quit fooling around with the silly "perks' and silly discounts for only certain people. This is costing a lot of money and gets next to no retained customers. I do not stay with a cell phone company for a "Popeyes" anything. I and most other people want excellent service and none of the Tuesday Giveaways. Spend all your cash on improvements to the network and stop all the playing around. If you have to give away a Burger King sandwich to hold onto a customer, you must have a bad network. Get a good network and you will not have to give away hamburgers.

Turning off Sprint's band 41 is not working well for anybody. All those Sprint Subs get dropped to band 25 or 26. Why do they think this would not cause severe congestion and get people upset. I would not give them a good grade on how they are handling the network upgrades/conversion. If they keep terrorizing the old Sprint Subs, they will see them fleeing out the door. All they seem interesting in doing is getting a 5G network established very quickly while ignoring all the havoc they are creating.

Yep, I am still on Sprint, but I do have a T-Mobile phone to play with. I find t-Mobile service was much worse than Sprint service in the places I traveled in the last month or two. The T-Mobile network just does not have enough sites and therefor band 2, 4, & 66 just can not cover much of their territory. Since those bands quite often fail to provide the service, the band 12 and band 71 have to do the lifting. Those two bands are ave available to latch onto, but they are always totally congested. T-Mobile desperately needed the Spectrum owned by Sprint and also the additional cell sites that Sprint had. Even with that, they STILL need to add more NEW sites. T-Mobile was a marketing powerhouse. People believed what T-Mobile put out. However, it was a bunch of hype and the service was not nearly as good as claimed. They got away with this for a long time, but without more spectrum they were slowing going to have big issues. They do have a chance to fix this if they ever get the Sprint and T-Mobile networks combined correctly. That remains to be seen. Before anybody jumps all over me for this post, I do agree that T-Mobile was fine in some areas. It sure was not fine in a bunch of other areas. Band 71 did not fix it either. It helped, but did not really fix the issues in many places.

All Good Valid Questions. If I remember correctly, I think T-Mobile has to assist with financing should Shentel want to buy out T-Mobiles assets. If my memory is good on that point, it might make a difference. T-Mobile surely has their hands full of issues in the country. If I were in their shoes, I would be very happy to have Shentel upgrade and manage all assets in the current Shentel area. Shentel's Sprint network is very very good. They built a network that was better then Sprint was elsewhere. There is no question that Shentel would do a much better job combining the networks than T-Mobile would. T-Mobile really needs Shentel to continue their good work. I hope T-Mobile realizes that. T-Mobile's network in most of the Shentel territory is not good. Shentel's Sprint network is very very good. Shentel could easily combine them efficiently and have a superior network to anybody else.

Some of the things I see and hear about what T-Mobile has been doing makes me think that they might be one big screwed up organization. I hope I am wrong, but so far, things are not looking good.

The Sprint Customers surely have a lot of value. Nobody would allow them to fade away. Something will be done. The best option is for Shentel to continue somehow with this area. They built a killer network. Much much better than any other network in this area. Things will go downhill real fast if Shentel is out of the picture. Actually, the Shentel network is so good that the Shentel sites need to be the backbone of the new network. Add t-mobile spectrum to the Shentel sites. Shentel is near perfect here and T-Mobile is very very poor. Shentel can fix that real quick.

Your area must be unique. I NEVER see dense T-Mobile coverage. T-Mobile is actually the worst carrier by far in my eyes. They normally do not know what dense means. To make a good network, it is going to be very very expensive because they are starting with a very poor network. T-Mobile was a great marketing device, but not a great cell phone carrier.

They are trying to get two different results with the upgrades. The 600 Mhz upgrade was to get more range from the site to cover fringe areas. The 2500 upgrade is to get faster speeds & capacity in major population areas.

Maybe there will be more antennas hoisted up yet.

They seem to be totally intent on killing Sprint band 41 and activating T-Mobile 5G on band 41. This does need to be done, but I seem to see quite a few people complaining about the result being bad. Some people need to actually turn off 5G on their new phones and use 4G. So, if this is true, they are not getting it right at least in some places. They do need to somehow get band 2/25 straightened out. In many cases,Sprint has loads of band 25 that T-Mobile has not touched. This is a massive job and I have some doubts that they will do it and not cause lots of issues. in my area(Shentel) T-Mobile is nowhere close to being up to Shentel's standards. Shentel's Sprint service works very very good. T-Mobile is a disaster here. If T-Mobile has service like this in other parts of the country, we are using the wrong network for the base network.

I got the message a week ago. Have a Samsung S9 on Shentel.

Ahhhh, A couple of times I saw t-mobile band 41 in my neighbor sites and I knew that was wrong. It was coming from a known t-mobile site but the site only has band 2 & 12. Had me guessing. I saw this on a Galaxy S9. When it shows this, it does not have a valid receive level. Shows some level like (-190325643) Yes weird.

Foreign visitors can grab a cheapie Prepaid phone for their limited time visit.

I hope you are wrong about that. T-Mobile has some real crazy people in the organization, but that does not mean that they would not be good people. There has to be some really smart people there or the company would not have survived. Some of the crazy people will be smart and some of the smart people will be crazy. The organization has many people that are just crazy over cell phones, data and wireless. Anyway, maybe we will be lucky enough to have loads of info become available. We sure do hope so. Sprint had some crazy people too and some smart people also. Many of them are here on this site in some way.

You are almost in the same class as I am. Actually I date back before the 70"s. I have seen antenna technology change quite often. This is exactly why I asked the question. I am too old to be involved with designing or installing cell sites anymore. However, it just may be possible to find somebody smarter than me that could figure it all out. You have to start thinking less about the physical size antenna and more about the electronics at the antenna. Some laws just can not be broken with RF, but who ever thought those big radios on the ground could be made much more efficient, sized way down and become part of the top mounted antenna. In the 60's, I never dreamed that fiber would be between the base station cabinet and the antennas. We did not even have cell phones.

Yes, things might get sort of messy. The best talent might depart and it could be from either side.

Is it possible that somebody might come up with a way to do MIMO on band 71 with some kind of antenna magic? Consider how small the antennas are for band 71 in the phone. Any company that can come up with a MIMO antenna for band 71 would probably have all the market to themselves for awhile. I do realize the antennas in a phone are not going to ever be the same at a base station. But we can hope that the base station antennas can be improved.

What I liked about S4GRU was that the site drew the technical people rather that the ones that had phone problems from drops or water issue and billing issues. Technical issues got discussed here and solved. Problem children were on REDDIT or similar sites with crazy issues that they often created themselves.

If they have to borrow money to do a high amount of upgrades, now is the time to do it with interest rates so low. They still have to pay off the loans at some point, but very low interest is sure attractive. Sprint might have been borrowed to the hilt, but T-Mobile has loads of debt too. I am not sure how much more they can borrow to do massive upgrades.

If I was responsible for managing US Cellular and wanted to stay in business, I would try to get a very good new roaming agreement with the new T-Mobile. Even that may not be enough to survive, but that is their best chance to remain in business.